Raptor (93 page)

“Maggot?” I echoed, amused.

“His name is really Maghib. But he is the man I send afield for my raw material, and he has always been able to find for me the mud of the slimiest consistency and most nauseous stench. He grubs up mud”—Meirus shrugged—“hence: Maggot.”

The man was an undersized, oily-skinned Armenian, rather mud-colored himself, and he groveled quite maggotlike as he said in heavily accented Gothic, “At your command, fráuja.”

He stood in a cringing sort of crouch while the Mudman jabbered something at him in his own language. Then Maggot jabbered back at some length.

“Done,” Meirus said to me. “Whenever you are ready to make an excursion into the outlying lands, come here and get Maggot to accompany you. He says he does indeed know of elderly Goths of all persuasions—Visigoth, Ostrogoth, Gepid—who may just know things of times past.”

“Thags izei,” I said to them both. As Maggot backed servilely away to become a part of the gloom again, I added, “Meanwhile, good Meirus, you yourself seem to know all there is to know about names—including the bestowing of them. Would you happen to know how the Gepid Goths came to be so called?”

He laughed and said, “Of course.”

I waited a moment, then prodded him, “Would you be so kind, then, as to tell me?”

“Akh, I thought you were but trying me. You really do not know? The Gepids’ name derives from the Gothic word ‘gepanta’—slow, languid, apathetic.”

“So I have heard conjectured. But why?”

The old Jew clasped his pudgy hands across his vast belly. “In my minstrel days, I used to have to sing all manner of the Goyim’s songs-from-old—no doubt making my own forefathers twirl in their graves. There was one song that told how the Goths came from the far north to this continent of Europe. They came, it said, in three ships, one bearing each tribe—or sibja, or nation, or whatever they called their related divisions in those early times. And one of the ships lagged far behind the other two, and landed its passengers some while after the others, and those people continued ever afterward to tarry and dawdle behind the others, all during their subsequent travels. Hence”—he laughed again—“the slow ones, the Gepids.”

I laughed with him. “A plausible story. I shall make a note of that as well. I am most grateful to you. Tomorrow I will come”—I smiled—“with my unwrinkled lady companion, and we will avail ourselves of the guide you have so generously offered. Shall I bring an extra horse for him?”

“Ne, ne, do not spoil the creature. Maggot is accustomed to trot alongside my carruca whenever I go myself afield. I promise to feed him some extra swill in the morning, to give him strength to trot. Until tomorrow, then.”

Next morning, after the old Jew had been introduced to Swanilda, and he gallantly had averred that she would
never
need his mud, he said to me:

“You and I, Saio Thorn, seem always to be talking of names. May I ask now—are you acquainted with the name Thor?”

“Who is not?” I said. “He is the Old Religion’s god of thunder.”

“And are you often followed about by a god? I must say, he did not look much like a god, but he had the arrogant temper and rudeness of one.”

“Who
did?”

“A newly come young man—or god, if Thor is really his name, as he claims it is. Also he is decked all over with the emblems of that god. He wears a Thor’s-hammer pendant around his neck. His mantle fibula and his belt buckle are emblazoned with the ugly angular cross that symbolizes Thor’s hammer being swung in a circle. He came ashore with his horse from another barge not long after you were here. A man of about your own age and size and coloring. And beardless, which I would not expect a god to be. He asked for you by name, and gave a recognizable description of you. I wondered if he might be your associate or assistant or apprentice, or something.”

“He is not any such thing. He is no one I know.”

“Strange. He knows you. He said he just missed catching up to you at Durostorum. And he seemed much put out about having had to chase you this far. He grumbled and growled and snarled, very like a god, indeed.”

I remembered the horseman who had watched from the dock upriver as our barge pulled away. But that gave me no hint of his identity or his reason for trailing me. I merely said, with some impatience, “Whoever it is, I dislike being followed.”

“Then I am glad that I pretended to him that I had not seen or ever heard of you. But this Thor person did come to me, the Mudman, to inquire about you, so he must be quick and clever. He had so soon discovered that I am, so to speak, Noviodunum’s fount of information. He
expected
that you would have visited me. He is sure to come here seeking you again.”

Annoyed, but not sure why I was annoyed, I snapped, “I do not care what he does! I do not know him. I never heard of
anyone
assuming the name of a god.”

But Swanilda spoke up, saying lightly, “If you think about it, the name Thor, in the Roman alphabet, is only one letter away from being
your
name, Thorn.”

Her casual remark brought me up short. I murmured, “You are right. I have so seldom seen my name written down. Until this moment, I never took cognizance of that.”

I might have wished to muse on that little revelation, but Meirus persisted in pestering me: “May I ask you in confidence, Marshal, might this person be some old enemy of yours?”

Again irked to an inexplicable degree, I said through my teeth, “To the best of my recollection, I have never had an enemy—not god or mortal—named Thor. But if this man is one, and he visits you again, you may tell him that I prefer my enemies to come at me from the front, not from behind.”

“You would not care to wait and tell him yourself? I should think you would at least be curious to see him.”

Yet again I could not have said why—unless I was feeling some premonition—but by now I was exceedingly vexed, and I burst out:

“Understand me, Mudman! I have no least interest in an unknown hanger-on. I have no more regard for this person who dogs my tracks than the vanguard Goths had for the laggard Gepids. Summon your man Maggot out here, and we will be off. If any godling or godlet or godkin is really determined to find me, he can slog through the marshlands after me.”

“As you say, Saio Thorn. Then, if the person calls here again, shall I point him in the direction you have gone?”

“Iésus Xristus! I do not give a ferta if you drown him in a vat of your misbegotten mud!”

Meirus put up his hands defensively and said, “Oh vái! You sound as fierce and angry and commanding as he did. Very like a god yourself. By my fathers, I should like to be present when you two
do
meet. Thor and Thorn.”

Swanilda and I did not leave Noviodunum at a canter, because we had to hold our horses to a pace that Maggot could keep up with. At the outskirts of the town, Swanilda looked back and said, “We are not being followed by anybody, Thorn.”

I grunted, “Maybe gods are late sleepers. Let the devil take that one napping.”

“My fráuja the Mudman has explained to me your interests, fráuja Thorn,” said Maggot, who evidently could talk without panting as he trotted. “I will introduce you to an aged Ostrogoth couple of my acquaintance who, like all old folk, are much given to reminiscence of the past.”

“Very good, Maggot. But will we be able to do all our traveling in these swampy lands on horseback? Or will we have to take to the water now and again?”

“Ne, ne. You will find some of the ground unpleasantly soggy, but I am familiar with the paths that will take us around or across the marshier places. You can trust me, fráuja, to guide you without hazard or inconvenience.”

The land was mostly flat and covered with silvery-green, feathery grass that would, if vertical, have stood higher than my head, even with me atop Velox. But such slender stems had bent to the ground while growing, so the grasses lay curved by the wind, and billowed like waves, about knee-high to Maggot and the horses. In the places where the grass did not choose to grow, the land was carpeted with blue-flowering salvia; it gave out a keen herbal scent when trodden on.

We frequently saw flocks of birds, many I had never seen elsewhere: the graceful-beaked glossy ibis, the clumsy-beaked crispus pelican, the elegantly plumed egret. We did not glimpse any of the delta’s native mammals, but we did come upon stray cattle and sheep, let run by their owners to forage for themselves, so they had become more wild than domesticated. As Maggot had warned, the ground often squished and heaved underfoot, but here and there the land rose up into a hillock dry and sturdy enough to support a house, and it was only on those higher places that the local inhabitants had built their houses.

At midmorning, the sky clouded over with dramatic suddenness, and we were enveloped in twilight. I had to take out my sun-stone to scan the sky and make sure we were still heading north. But very soon the cloud cover got too thick and black to let the glitmuns show me the pale blue patch where the sun stood. Then lightning began to flare and thunder to roll and the rain came down violently and drenchingly. The lightning sizzled and jagged all about, and I was more concerned about our being the tallest objects in that flat land. My concern was not eased by Swanilda’s laughing remark:

“Do you suppose Thor sent his thunder to seek us out?”

I had put that person out of my mind, and was not much pleased to be reminded of him. Anyway, there was no shelter anywhere about, so Maggot could only lead us lumbering on, as best he could, through the curtain of rain. Then, abruptly, the three of us were cowering and covering our heads with our arms, and the horses were dancing in distress, because the rain changed to a fiercely lashing white hail. The cold pellets, as big as grapes, hit like hard-thrown gravel, and caromed and bounced and seethed, and beat down the feather grass around us, and turned the ground to an uneasily twitching and squirming white floor. The downpelt was sufficiently hurtful to make me almost believe that Thor
was
malignantly besetting us. Maggot raised his voice to shout to me over the ambient noise:

“Be not distraught, fráuja. These sudden squalls are common here in the delta. They never last for long.”

Even as he spoke, the storm began to diminish, and we could see about us, and we went on, the horses’ hoofs crunching and slithering on the ice-pebbled surface. But the hail ceased and the sun came out, as suddenly as it had disappeared, and the heavy glaze on the land melted, and the battered-down grasses began to shake themselves dry and unfold to their former feathery waves and whorls.

Toward sundown we approached a hillock on which stood a fairly well-built wooden house. As we went up the slope to it, Maggot gave a shout, and from the dwelling’s leather-flapped doorway emerged two persons. He called to them, “Háils, Fillein uh Baúhts!” and they waved and responded, “Háils, Maghib!”

As is the case with so many aged couples, the husband and wife would have been indistinguishable—by their bent, frail figures or their garb or their wrinkled faces—except that the man wore a full white beard and the woman only a scanty mustache and some stray wild hairs sprouting from her chin and cheeks. Swanilda and I got down from our horses, and Maggot introduced us all around.

“This is the good man Fillein and his good woman Baúhts, Ostrogoths both.” To them he said, “Old people, I am proud to present to you the fráuja Thorn, marshal of the King of the Ostrogoths, and his companion, the lady Swanilda.”

Instead of greeting or saluting me, old Fillein surprised me by saying querulously, “Thorn? Thorn? This is no king’s marshal. King Thiudamer’s marshal is named Soas. I may be old and weak of mind, but I remember
that.”

I smiled and said, “Excuse me, venerable Fillein. Soas still is marshal, true, but I am another. And King Thiudamer has been dead these many years. His son Thiuda the Younger reigns now in his stead, and is called Thiudareikhs—or more commonly Theodoric. It was he who appointed me fellow marshal to Saio Soas.”

“You do not make jape of me, niu?” the old man said uncertainly. “This is true?”

“It could be so,” his wife put in, her voice equally thin and quavery. “Do you not remember, husband, when that son was born? The child of victory, we all called him.” To me she said, “Is that Thiuda now grown to manhood and kingship, niu? Vái, how the time does go.”

“The time does go,” Fillein echoed, with melancholy. “Then… waíla-gamotjands, Saio Thorn. Our humble house is yours. And you must be hungry. Come in, come in.”

Maggot took the horses around to the rear of the house, to find some feed for them, and Swanilda and I followed the old folks inside. Fillein poked the hearth embers into flame while Baúhts used a long forked stick to reach a slab of venison bacon down from the rafters, and both of them talked the while, in their wispy old voices.

“Ja, I do remember when young Thiuda was born,” said Fillein, meditatively champing his toothless mouth. “It was while our two kings, the brothers Thiudamer and Walamer, were in far-off Pannonia, fighting to overthrow the Hun oppressors, and—”

Baúhts interrupted him. “King Thiudamer we always called the Affectionate, and King Walamer the Faithful.”

I nodded and said with fond recollection, “I once was told that by Thiudamer’s daughter, the Princess Amalamena.” Perhaps because of the tone of my voice, I got a thoughtful look from Swanilda, who was helping the old woman start a meal for us.

Fillein went on, “As I was saying, one day during that time, we got word here that the brother kings had finally bested the Huns, that no Ostrogoths anywhere were any longer in bondage. On that same day, we heard also that Thiudamer’s consort had borne him a son.”

“That is why,” Baúhts put in, “we always spoke of the young Thiuda as the child of victory.”

I said to Fillein, “Then, before the reign of Thiudamer and his brother, you knew no monarch or master except the Hun chieftains?”

“Akh, not so! Once upon a time, I was, like all Ostrogoths, a subject of the father of those brothers, King Wandalar.”

“Known as the Vandal-Conqueror,” said Baúhts, as she and Swanilda hefted a great iron pot to set on the fire.